Comely Vessels: The Theological Aesthetics of “Saint Oscar” If Oscar Wilde would rewrite all the Bible, there would be no sceptics. - Max Beerbohm Oscar Wilde’s intensely liturgical Salome epitomizes decadent Catholic literature. i Cloistered in its single scene and setting, its repetitions evocative of ritual and its exotic yet spartan French suggestive of ecclesiastical Latin, Salome is a rewriting of Scripture that dramatizes the perils of alienating the flesh from the spirit, and distancing words from the Word. Wilde was powerfully attracted to Jesus as a personality and to Catholicism as a work of art, but he wrestled with faith and toyed with the idea of conversion for decades before finally submitting to the Church on his deathbed. Wilde perceived the limited framework for “valid” religious experience in Victorian culture as an obstacle rather than a path to God, but he found in art - and, equivocally, in Catholicism - a material religion that spoke to his senses. Dissatisfied with the intangibility of doctrine, Wilde professed, “The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands” (De Profundis 103). While De Profundis explicitly reveals that Wilde’s “temples” are comprised of such things as “Shakespeare’s sonnets,” “Chopin’s nocturnes,” and “Aeschylean plays,” the text also implies that Wilde’s own art, which he references with great frequency, is meant to be a dwelling place for the divine (120). Wilde was not alone in his quest for a more concrete religion: by one count there were approximately ten thousand British converts to Catholicism annually throughout the 1890s, with fin de siècle literature playing no small role in the movement toward Rome (Hanson 253). Ellis Hanson goes so far as to assert that “[n]o other literary movement can claim [as] many converts to Rome” as decadence (11). Nevertheless, faith inspired by decadence and aestheticism is often discredited as a “mere trend,” a “cultural aberration,” or an “insincere ‘perversion’” of Catholicism (14). Far from being insincere, however, for Wilde the intersection